Mobile Internet Painfully Slow Today?

[Crugath]

I'm not sure if I'm jumping the gun a little here, but...

Since yesterday evening, I've noticed that trying to browse the internet using Contract Internet or Contract WAP on my n95-8gb has been entirely unusable.

For example google.com has taken about 5mins to load up, and using Opera Mini just results in timeouts almost always.

Where as if I connect to the internet using the wifi, everything's fine.

Today I have done a factory reset of my phone, as well as reinstalling the firmware (v31), I have also requested connection configurations from the vodafone website, which also haven't worked.

I am not sure if this is limited to where I live (Filton, Bristol - BS34 7HQ), or whether something has happened to my phone.

I apologise if this is just a temporary issue and I'm asking about it too soon, but it seems odd, as this has never happened before, since I got this phone (november 2007).

Thank you

[techmind]

Hi - has it got any better since?

There could be all manner of causes, from weak signal owing to a mast being down to local cell congestion (my 3G broadband was extra-extra bad on Wednesday evening) to issues with DNS servers ...and others. It could even be issues (compounded by ?nationwide? heavy usage) with Vodafone web proxies - something some of us 3G broadband users have been suffering on and off for several months now.
If it's the latter, then secure ( https:// ) sites should be largely unaffected by the go-slow. Not that that helps, but for diagnostics.
If it's local cell congestion then my experience when this is most atrocious you often find that the upload speed is also limited to 20kbps or less (which because of the way downloaded data has to be 'acknowledged', indirectly throttles downloads).

Actually now I think of it, Thursday night had some extremely heavy rain. It might be possible that this was attenuating the signal either between you and the base station, or on the microwave links between base stations, causing effectively a loss of connection.

Hope things have sorted themselves for you by now.

[Ben_H]

Hi Crugath,

Thanks for posting and a massive warm welcome to the eForum!

I've checked the notice board and there's nothing mentioned for the Bristol area at the moment. After checking your postcode, I can see you're slap bang in the middle of three 3G sites so I bet your speeds are usually top notch! That being said, site number 1569, just north of your location, does seem to have been handling some exceptionally large traffic lately which would indeed slow your data right down.

As techmind very helpfully pointed out, this could be down to a number of factors such as weather, atmospherics (sounds a lot more scientific than it really is ), or even flora and fauna! I dealt with a couple of "trees need trimming" issues myself over last week

Let me know if it is indeed back up to standard or if it's more than a blip that I need to dig into further for you.

Cheers, Ben

eForum Team